Posts Tagged ‘sweeney todd’

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp reteam to make a big screen version of Dark Shadows.

The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory team of director Tim Burton, star Johnny Depp, and screenwriter John August are reportedly looking to re-team for a big screen version of the cult classic TV series Dark Shadows.

Director Pete Segal revealed to IESB over the weekend that his Shazam! screenwriter John August is also busy working on Burton’s Dark Shadows. This was the first time that Burton and August’s involvement with the Warners-based Shadows had surfaced.

It was announced last July that Depp would produce, via his Infinitum-Nihil production banner, a feature film version of Dark Shadows along with Graham King. It’s also expected that Depp would play the lead role of vampire patriarch Barnabas Collins, played on the original 1966-71 series by Jonathan Frid and in a short-lived 1990s revival by Ben Cross.

Today is my birthday, and I am reminded on this day of my 32nd year that even to a diehard cineaste like me, there was a time when movies were just movies — disposable pieces of entertainment that stirred base impulses or satisfied simple needs, but otherwise left little or no impact on my daily life. During my then-burgeoning adolescence, two movies fundamentally changed that perception for me and the first of those two was Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. The second was Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, the first film in which I remember crying. But Burton’s film was exceptional because, quite frankly, it marked the first time I truly cared who made it, much less the fact that it seemed like a landscape of my own imagination, writ large on the silver screen.

22 years later, Burton releases Sweeney Todd, a radically different but no less imaginative work and I am again wowed. Wowed not because I could possibly have imagined the world he creates, or even because it resuscitates my flagging interest in movie musicals. Rather, it’s because he has once again taken the boundaries of conventional cinema and explored and expanded them in the way that only Burton can.

Longtime collaborator Johnny Depp plays Sweeney Todd — a barber who returns to London to take revenge on Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), the man who incarcerated him in order to steal his wife Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly). Arriving home on a vessel piloted by a young sailor named Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), Todd discovers that his former abode is now occupied by Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) — a struggling purveyor of meat pies. The pair soon strike a morbid pact to dispose of his victims — she’ll cook their remains into her cuisine. But complications arise when Todd’s identity is discovered by a competing barber named Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen), and then Turpin associates him with Hope, who pines for the judge’s ward and coincidentally Todd’s daughter Johanna (Jayne Wisener).

Fresh from playing the villainous barber in Sweeney Todd, Johnny Depp has signed on to play another villain (that’s the rumor). This time Depp is considering playing the gangster, John Dillinger. He is said to be in talks with Michael Mann this week about portraying the infamous gangster (Dillinger) in the upcoming feature length film, which is set to begin shooting in March of 2008.

With two of his projects stalling due to the writers strike, Johnny Depp is considering filling the gap by playing gangster John Dillinger in a Depression-era crime drama.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Depp was to have starred in film adaptations of either The Rum Diaries or Shantaram, but following the writing delay, he is now being wooed by director Michael Mann for his long-gestating gangster flick.

Based on Brian Burroughs’ non-fiction tome Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34, the film will not only chronicle the unlawful activities of the likes of Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde, but also the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. to bring them to justice.

Synopsis:Johnny Depp and Tim Burton join forces again in a big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning musical thriller “Sweeney Todd.” Depp stars in the title role as a man unjustly sent to prison who vows revenge, not only for that cruel punishment, but for the devastating consequences of what happened to his wife and daughter. When he returns to reopen his barber shop, Sweeney Todd becomes the Demon Barber of Fleet Street who “shaved the heads of gentlemen who never thereafter were heard from again.” Joining Depp is Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney’s amorous accomplice, who creates diabolical meat pies. The cast also includes Alan Rickman, who portrays the evil Judge Turpin, who sends Sweeney to prison and Timothy Spall as the Judge’s wicked associate Beadle Bamford and Sacha Baron Cohen is a rival barber, the flamboyant Signor Adolfo Pirelli.